This invention relates to the field of process automation. In particular, the invention relates to adaptive business process automation.
Business processes are often defined as a flow sequence of operations on a single or set of systems or applications. This flow is composed of interactions with screens of the system in which the operator needs to verify fields of information for a valid content, take note of certain fields for later processing, enter new information or update existing fields, and navigate between screens.
Some business processes involve systems or applications that were not designed with optimization of operator work in mind. Some business processes involve a combination of systems which were not designed to interact and work together. Therefore, these processes are often cumbersome, involve many operations on possibly different screens in possibly different systems, and hence error prone.
The result of these issues is that often an operator needs to invest a considerable amount of time and effort in order to complete the business process. This time and effort has a substantial cost for the organization, which can be significantly reduced.
There are existing systems that assist operators and users in these processes. For example, there are tools that help users fill online forms using pre-populated information of the user (e.g., name, address, phone number), as well as more elaborate systems that can automatically extract such information from the user's actions (e.g., password managers) and resources, such as email correspondence.